Recent silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material products are so improved as to form remarkably high-quality images. The three major elements of an image quality -- graininess, sharpness and color reproducibility -- are all on a considerably high level, so that most customers appear to be contented with their prints or slide photos reproduced.
However, of the above three major elements, regarding the color reproducibility, a certain color that is conventionally said hard to be reproduced in a photograph still now remains unchanged although its color purity is improved.
That is, there are many problems yet to be solved in the color reproducibility. For example, purple, bluish purple, which reflect lights having longer wavelengths than 600 nm, or greenish colors, such as bluish green and yellowish green, tend to be reproduced into colors quite different from the actual colors, which may disappoint customers.
Therefore, there has been a strong demand for improving the above problem. The major factors of the color reproducibility in conventional techniques are the spectral sensitivity distribution and interimage effect.
It is conventionally known that the interimage effect can be attained by adding to a silver halide multilayer color photographic light-sensitive material a compound called DIR compound capable of releasing a development inhibitor or a precursor thereof upon its coupling reaction with a color developing agent, wherein the development inhibitor inhibits the development of different color-forming layers to thereby create an interimage effect for color reproducibility improvement.
In a color negative film, it is also possible to make an effect similar to the interimage effect by using a colored coupler in a larger amount than is necessary to cancel a useless absorption.
However, the use of an excessive amount of a colored coupler causes the minimum density of the film to increase, which makes it very difficult to judge the color density correction in making prints, sometimes resulting in an inferior color quality of finished prints. The above techniques chiefly contribute to improvement of color purity, rather than the color reproducibility.
On the other hand, as for the spectral sensitivity distribution, U.S. Pat. No. 3,672,898 discloses a proper spectral sensitivity distribution for reducing the variation of the color reproducibility by different light sources used in photographing.
This, however, is not a means for correcting the aforementioned wrong color reproduction. There is also disclosed a spectral distribution/interimage effect combination technique; for example, JP O.P.I. No. 034541/1986 makes an attempt to improve the foregoing color film's reproduction of certain colors hard to be reproduced, and its effect appears to have been obtained to some extent. The attempt is to exert not only the respective effects of the conventional blue-sensitive layer, green-sensitive layer and red-sensitive layer but also the interimage effect from the outside of the wavelengths to which the above color-sensitive layers are sensitive.
The above technique is considered useful to a certain extent for improving the reproducibility of specific colors, but the technique, for interimage effect generation, needs an interimage effect-generating layer and a light-sensitive silver halide layer in addition to the conventional blue-sensitive green-sensitive and red-sensitive emulsion layers, which requires increasing the amount of silver and the number of production processes to thus result in a high production cost. Besides, its effect is not sufficient.
The foregoing U.S. Pat. No. 3,672,898, discloses a spectral sensitivity distribution for reducing the color reproducibility variation due to different light sources used in photographing; this intends to reduce the color variation by bringing the spectral sensitivity distributions of the blue-sensitive and red-sensitive layers close to that of the green-sensitive layer to thereby lessen the changes in the sensitivities of these layers corresponding to different light sources, particularly different color temperatures, in photographing. In this instance, the three color-sensitive layers are so close to one another as to overlap their spectral sensitivity distributions to cause a color purity deterioration. The color purity deterioration can be prevented to a certain extent, as is well known, by emphasizing the interimage effect by use of the foregoing diffusible DIR compound. However, it has been found that even any combination of the above techniques is unable to render any satisfactory color reproduction to the recently prevailing photographing under fluorescent lamp lighting conditions.